This site doesn't use an offsite host; we ask that users post their pictures here.
And I will tell you why:
If you go to any and every internet forum on this earth, any thread that's more than 90 days old is utterly and totally useless because the site has no control over where the posters are hosting their images. The users are using imgur, flikr, photobucket, surfacezero, etc., etc. And since everyone wants free hosting, they hit their limit and they don't want to pay for the service, so they................ start deleting images without thinking (or, more likely, caring) that when they delete the images from the host site, the images disappear from the threads they were in.
The only way for internet forums to hold information longer than say 90 days is to force the users to upload their image to the site. This creates a lot of issues for us, hosting wise, but it's the only way to keep the forum archive functional.